Fondness, Affection, Flourishing, Reflection
Same theme so same picture. Thanks for this again Bria of Antartica (one of the first of the Fellowship of The Dimly Lit.) Are you seeing this?!
“With nothing to believe in, the compass always points to…” --Robert Hunter (This needs some complex context before it makes sense to finish the line, the source, and the interpretation—according to Stu.)
These posts/episodes, counting up from Episode Minus 10 to Episode 1, when presumably something else happens, are mostly from emails I send to about sixty of my former students, who now range in age from around 30 to 42. Forty-two is a very special number for those of you interested in the meaning of life. Did you click that? Sometimes references to niche classics can get tedious, so I hope your intuition on click/don’t click served you well.
Personally, I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, but Bug Stu has always been intrigued. He’s definitely a numbers guy, and things like having the Medium version of The Pie launch on National Pie Day 2020 unintentionally, and then having Episode 1 here at the website coming up on National Pie Day 2022, when my oldest former students are 42 (on average as of 1/23/22 +/-), among dozens of other half-magical things, convergences we call them, confirm his sense of purpose and sustains his will to live—to live well even, whatever that might mean.
And magically, here we are again at the meaning of life thing, or meaning in life, or sense of meaning, or whatever more complete expression makes more sense. Those rather vague expressions, the kind of Big Things people get sardonic about, can be distracting. Three or even four words cannot express, reliably, questions or answers that will provide us with broadly enjoyable lives.
To Stu, and I see his point, attempts at life-encompassing phrases can be a sort of unwitting straw man effect. That is, the phrase is framed as foundational, with the implication that it can guide us to satisfaction, enjoyment, and harmony with others. When it is shown to have little reliable practical application, the impression might be that Big Questions have no real meaning.
But who would want to employ such a misanthropic straw man tactic? Maybe hyperopic/myopic unintentional de facto misanthropes. Or maybe an unseen alien army that wants to drive us off the planet so they can take over after having wrecked theirs. Stu proposes the latter. Clearly, this is complicated. It also isn’t the most intuitive story direction given the reflections below, I understand.
Anyway, I think we’ve come a long way since 1979 (a very meaningful year for me and This Project), when 42 was the book answer to Everything according to Douglas Adams and the Guide. Beyond my former students, the full age range of readers in the email group is 25 or 6 to 84. (Stu sees a connection there to the band Chicago and also George Orwell.) That wide range is good, because it’s hard to understand “Here” and “Now” by looking only from “Here” and “Now”.
Okay, before I digress, here’s something on a very different strand of reality.
(Continued from Episode Minus 5 sort of)
Fondness, Affection, Flourishing, Reflection
(8 minute read)
Last time I said I would include some thoughts on my teaching days, which were mostly wonderful, and some of you were my students. As much as there is to be nostalgic about, the Science Olympiads, field trips, openly broken hearts, secret new loves, end of year parties, summers working together, and all the day-to-day drudgeries and dramas, that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking more about when my former teachers would talk to me ten or more years after my own high school graduation.
As is usually the case from an inexperienced perspective, I didn’t know exactly what they were expressing. I still don’t know exactly, since I’m not them, but I think I know what I was missing in the look on their face and in their eyes when they spoke. I started teaching in the fall of 1996, and I knew that feeling pretty well by 2001, when my first seventh graders became old enough to drive and my first Physics students were leaving college or had started families, or both, or neither.
On one hand, teaching is about watching a river of youthful humanity with smiles, sadness, laughter, joking, disappointment, crying, mistreatment, mistreating, remorse, revenge, recovery, discovery, and so on, and then it all flowing out to the sea—never to be seen again, in a way, especially if you give weight to Heraclitus’ perspective:
No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man. --Heraclitus
In another way, the river is individuals, a particular boy, a particular girl, accompanied by more individuals, to be followed by more, some who connect with you and some who do not, and vice versa. But you realize that the fondness, the in some ways sustaining affection, is a relatively rare glimpse into a couple of functional subcategories of love (which seems maybe best spoken of only in subcategories. I wonder.)
And to some people, some institutions in the broadest sense, for conventional profit and otherwise, the river is for driving figurative electrical turbines, drawing into manufacturing operations for cooling and dilution, and otherwise feeding their own appetites and keeping up the economic customs—not to be too metaphorical, you know.
The river is real and necessary. But the “success” of the parasitic overlords and underlords (Stu’s term--i.e., Stralfs) and their machinations I mentioned above, depends on our awareness and imaginations of something more pleasant and maybe longer lasting, which entails our being more aware of our minds, influences, and outcomes. It’s too complex for mainstream lib/con memes, although we see mention of it occasionally.
Things that aren’t black/white, all-or-nothing, good/evil or otherwise fit well with the formulae for attention and mob growth are financially risky, relatively speaking. Muddled masses don’t subscribe, as Stu has often said, so simpler things sell and drive the cultural contexts and conversations. That’s really too bad, and it’s a serious distortion of reality.
One of the things about the teachers’ perspective is that the river keeps reinforcing the impression that things matter, and they’re complex. Everyone knows the river is there, and most people have some direct experience with the flow by way of their kids or kids of family and friends. But greater time and attention on any phenomenon enlarges its significance to the bigger picture of existence we all share and affect. This isn’t just about school and childhood.
Being a teacher tends to force the time and attention, not that it necessarily makes teachers, or me, authorities on lives. But I guess it’s like a lot of things where we can imagine how it is and what’s needed from the outside, or read from a book, but our immersion in that thing, if there’s time, in a broad way, practically forces more contemplation as well as providing unanticipated experiences and thoughts.
I’m not saying these observations are important because I was a teacher, I’m just saying I never would have explored this realm or seen it this way if I hadn’t been a teacher. I guess that’s why it’s part of today’s theme.
By saying things matter, I didn’t just mean material things, in case you were wondering. I meant it in opposition to the assertion that nothing matters. But reflecting on that sentiment, that nothing matters, tentatively embracing it even, can actually be beneficial.
To me, that seemingly dark reflection can help by taking our minds to a high enough place, philosophically, that we can see how certain kinds of philosophical speculation and thought construction fall apart. Sometimes I call this A Why Too Far, but really, it’s a good place to visit just for reminding ourselves it exists, so we can head back down to where happiness and satisfaction are made and enjoyed, or missed.
When we do head back down, we eventually get to the very idea of the context in which we’re living, thinking, and feeling. And it has such an impact on so many of our personal and cultural quandaries, or our perception of them. The 7th Pie Theory that I keep saying Stu will talk about, in a SHEDexo Talk, is partly about providing a more intentional context from which to consider other things.
That context is as much a physically derived state as a mental/philosophical one. A lot of people are working in the realm of self-care right now, and I’m not sure whether I’d categorize this as part of that or instead apart from that. In a way it’s both, but…I don’t digress.
I see 7th Pie Theory as filling in a void in our social/economic offerings, and one that’s very close to the ground, which is why I’ve sometimes referred to it as a Landing. It also invites some alternative thinking on things like consumerism, conservation, progressivism, conservatism, progress, knowledge, technology, enjoyment, etc., without being weird or Utopian or suggesting a panacea for today’s problems.
This is where the term Indsteadavision comes from. Not that it’s one particular vision, but that it involves using a different vision or different kind of vision, perspective, and evaluation. I’ve mentioned before how Stu’s compound eyes and Allie’s way-up-high perspective represent this, at least as a way to explore. Allie’s higher perspective is meant as in gaging conditions broadly and wholistically, not as in higher philosophical levels.
The stratospheric levels of philosophy can also become fauxlosophy, as you’ve seen me call it, where the real goal in use is justification of something entirely earthly in our or in our friends’ past, present, or anticipated future. We’re motivated that is. That brings motivated reasoning and inner conflicts we resolve in different ways, depending on a combination of absorbed customs and fear of missing out in all kinds of ways.
In a way, it goes back to my first super long poem, around 2500 words somehow, probably through digression, called Collisions of Good and The Shelling of Should, which I haven’t shared yet, because it’s better spoken than read. Maybe Stu will read it. Like the title suggests, it’s about derivations of good and how should is derived from those.
But good, like love, is ethereal enough to get discussed in the stratosphere along with other light and voluminous words that get blown up there from too much tactical talking and not enough testing, or doing maybe, and there’s not much oxygen.
Of course, that stratospheric fauxlosophy can be used in the negative as well, to anchor, ironically, our villainizing of something we don’t like. Or just to make up our minds about something, because we do like to have our minds made up (even if it’s essentially by others or for justification).
Like/Don’t Like
Liking is such a deceptively deep concept, and it hasn’t had near as much philosophical use/abuse as have love and good in that general mystical sense I notice. The world’s religions haven’t directly commanded us to like. And our political script writers don’t typically touch it directly, let alone sculpt it, weaponize it, breed it, or attempt to train us in its proper use. All those things might be implied by various forms of societal directors and physicians, but I feel like there’s a separate realm for liking, and I like it. Like seems earthy, grounded.
And I also think I’d rather be liked than loved, generally. It seems that we like to be loved, but we really love to be liked. That won’t make much sense if you’re taking love mainly to mean a higher level of liking. It also won’t make much sense, or feel very good, if you’ve been morally pressured to love things or people you don’t actually like just because you should. Know what I mean?
I can imagine a time when like is re-formed, or reformed, or combined, or conflated, with love in our modern/postmodern quasi-Orwellian ways--or is it just Machiavellian? Seriously, no lyrical pairing intended : ). So far, like is still pretty unadulterated, organic, and free-range.
Recognized religions and unrecognized religious modes of postmodern thought are meant for good, but shaping opinions, impressions, and judgments through lofty, passionate, word games, delays and expands personal and collective cognitive dissonances that I think will then surface, manifest, erupt, badly.
For now though, like is still on the ground, so to speak, with trees, water, soil, animals…and oxygen. Oxygen has a special meaning here, having to do with thought. I guess it’s part of that cozily expansive kind of thought I’ve mentioned before.
Sort of in honor of the latest convergences here, I’m including this quote I saw while I was checking my wording for the one at the beginning, and it’s also from Heraclitus. It seems very fitting right here, right now. To me, this gets into important related concepts of Flow, fun, liking, soil, Deep Work, context, and not getting too high off the ground for too long.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. –Heraclitus
Stu and I have a longish poem to go with about everything that I’ve mentioned today, but it takes some background, and this has been too long already.
Thanks for reading.
"Mr. Storey"